Stephanie Peters, a lead secretary at the Washington State Patrol Office in Morton, and her two teenagers are struggling with unreliable internet at their home in Glenoma.
During the second day of classes for the 2020-21 school year at Morton High School on Sept. 2, Stephanie Peters was forced to send her son, Jace Peters, a sophomore, to a friend’s house to use the internet to complete his distance learning. Currently, Mossyrock and Boistfort school districts are the only ones in Lewis County using a hybrid model of teaching for all students, though some schools began taking kindergarteners and some middle and high school classes back this week.
The Peters family lives just a quarter mile off U.S. Highway 12 in Glenoma and have spent the past few years with barely serviceable internet access. The family, who have lived in their house since 1995, used to have good internet with download speeds of around 7 to 8 megabits per second (Mbps), but as an increase of people moved into the area, they are lucky to see even 3 Mbps. An area is considered “underserved” if it has less than 25 Mbps broadband speed, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
It’s put undue stress on Peters and her family, who are navigating new waters during back-to-school and work-from-home switches amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Peters’ daughter, Shaylee Peters, is a senior at Morton High School who is currently attending Centralia College in the Running Start program. Peters, meanwhile is a lead secretary for the Washington State Patrol office in Morton.
That leaves three people, a state worker, a high school student and a college student, in the household trying to complete their online duties at the same time — and with frustrating results.
For the first four months of the pandemic, Peters added a HughesNet internet satellite to her CenturyLink service in hopes of fixing their internet woes. She bought the best package HughesNet offered in the area, boasting speeds of up to 50 Mbps, for $120 a month.
Peters used her CenturyLink hotspot while her two kids used HughesNet. They burned through their monthly 50 gigabyte (GB) data-limit plan, the company’s largest family plan, in less than a month.
“It was very limited,” Peters said. “It was so slow.”
So Peters decided to cancel their plan, accruing a $360 cancellation fee since they were under a two-year contract. But still, the $15 a month cancellation fee was much less of a blow than keeping a $120 a month plan that was faulty.
Now she pays $44 for just Centurylink, which gives her about 3.87 Mbps. It’s super slow, she said, and can only have one device connected to it at a time or it grinds to a halt. So the family has to take turns, but even then, the one person using the internet will get disconnected and reconnected about 50 times per day, she said.
Right now, her children have priority because they have online classes through Zoom.
“Now, here we are, in the midst of working from home and we all can’t be on the internet at the same time so we have to share,” Peters said. “It’s pretty much been a nightmare.”
Other options are unfeasible. She talked with a Wave Broadband employee who happened to be in the Glenoma area recently and he told her it would be $10 a foot to run internet lines to her house that is a quarter mile off the highway.
“Which, obviously, that’s not affordable,” Peters said. “It’s just unreal.”
Her mother lives behind her even further down their private road, and her internet is better than Peters’. Still, she knows it can be worse. Peters’ neighbor just down the road can’t even get CenturyLink at their house. They have to use HughesNet.
Peters, who has been working from home since April for the State Patrol, can go to the Morton office to accomplish tasks that take up a lot of bandwidth when absolutely needed. But the State Patrol wants office employees to work from home to keep the virus out of the office, especially since she works with State Troopers who are in contact with people from out of the county everyday.
“It’s not ideal,” Peters said. “They don’t want us working from the office, really, if we can help it.”
All summer Peters had been able to complete her work from home with little trouble as her kids didn’t need to be on the internet at the same time as her. But now that school has started, it’s become increasingly difficult. She did purchase $10 hotspots for her and her two kids’ phones as a backup plan, if needed.
On a typical morning, however, she’s kicked off the internet at least 10 times an hour while trying to do work. It’s forced Peters, who works a 10-hour shift, to have to get up and start work at 6 a.m. to try and complete her tasks before the kids wake up. Then she’ll use her cell phone data to check and answer emails throughout the day while the internet is being used.
“They can’t have that going on while they’re trying to do their schoolwork,” Peters said.
Morton High School handed out AT&T hotspots to students recently in hopes of helping students who live in areas with unreliable internet. It turns out the hotspot only works with the Chromebooks provided by the school, which are very slow and difficult to complete schoolwork on, Peters said. So Jace has been having to use his own laptop, which is faster and more efficient than the Chromebook but won’t work with the hotspot. Still, Peters noted that the school district is doing the best it can with a situation nobody was or could have prepared for.
“The school has been really good about understanding and helping families as much as they can,” Peters said. “I just hope and pray that we will get back in school.”
Shaylee, meanwhile, has finished her high school credits and is exclusively working in Running Start. She plans to graduate from Morton with her AA from Centralia College. On Monday, Sept. 28, Shaylee went to Centralia College to pick up a hotspot that the school was giving out to its students. It’s currently working well enough that the three can all use the internet at the same time. Still, Peters is hoping for a permanent solution in the future to solve their internet troubles.
“It’s just crazy,” Peters said. “I don’t know why it’s so tough to get infrastructure. I know we’re not the only ones. There are people much more remote than we are.”
